Rehearsal for security theatre?

At Changi, they check everyone's bags and boarding passes through an x-ray machine before you go to immigration, but the check feels a bit suspect because there's none of the expected take-your-laptop-out rigmarole that you get when you are checked again at the boarding gate before you get on the plane.

It doesn't feel that efficient, which is surprising for Singapore. Unless the dread hand of the economist-king is optimising for maximum-bottles-of-water-purchased-from-the-duty-free-shops. (You can't take more than 100 ml through the first checkpoint, but if you buy notionally terrorist-free water after that, you still can't take that through the second checkpoint. It's almost as if it were some immense boondoggle, whatever one of those is.)

Stop and Search

Today I took the MRT to the airport - slower and less convenient than a taxi, but without the stress of standing on the street, waiting for an elusive ride to appear. It was raining hard, so I had to sprint from the office to the station, and then yomp down the stairs as there's no down escalator from street level.

The hallways around the station are surprisingly crowded - probably because of the rain - it was strange, coming from Hong Kong, to encounter such a volume of slowly moving people in one place. I manhandled my case through the automatic barrier, and was about to throw myself down the escalator to the platform when I was stopped by the MRT security.